I did the original stage1-style install back in 2003. Have /home mounted on a separate partition. Since then I've moved my system from Intel to AMD to Intel, to laptops and desktops, 32 and 64 bits, single to quad cores, by simply doing a minimal Gentoo boot on a cloned disk, re-configuring and re-compiling the kernel and gcc, and then re-compiling world. Do a few driver and Xorg tweaks, and my system is back like it was, only much faster on the desktop, or more portable on the laptop. Network settings, custom application setups, ebuild patches I've made to certain apps, real-time tweaks for audio work, all that and more come back like magic. WAAAYYY nicer than installing and reconfiguring a new distribution from scratch, or trying to clone an existing binary distribution onto a different architecture. And there's no 'friendly' GUI app or background daemon quietly changing my setup during the process.

I use my systems for embedded software development, hardware design (electrical and mechanical), and FPGA firmware development, as well as the usual office and home finance apps, on both desktops and laptops. Almost all are native linux apps, some purchased, some free. I have all of my old machines from the early to mid 90's still running, from Windows 3.11 to Windows 2000, an old Redhat 5, etc. All as VMWare virtual machines. With it I can still fire up my old copy of Borland C++ 3.1, or AutoCAD, or any number of other long-ago engineering apps, as just another window on my Gentoo desktop. On my home system I even have a number of my old DOS, C64 and TRS-80 programs running just fine under the dosbox, x64 and trs80 emulators respectively (although I rarely use them anymore).

Gentoo is great for that sort of desktop OS stuff, porting from an older version of a processor to a newer one, or even across certain architectures provided a live CD is available. But I haven't had much use for it as an embedded OS, or seen it used much in clusters or the like. Yes, it's a meta-distribution, but portage doesn't support cross-compilation all that well, it's a 'hefty' OS to install on an embedded system, and it requires more regular maintenance than I'd care to perform on a cluster. There are more specialized distributions for those applications. I like Gentoo for what it is, namely, an easy-to-customize desktop OS that lets me do things my way without requiring me to do the Linux from Scratch thing.

BTW, am I the only one who can't understand why the Gentoo forum spell-checker thinks 'Gentoo' is a mis-spelling

My old desktop computer at work runs Gentoo 32bit on an old Xeon-1 CPU with 1.5 GiB of memory. I am using Openbox with the most recent (stable) xorg-server and nouveau drivers for an nVidia 5200-PCI there. Main applications are:

Konsole - I need a lot of ssh connections to our servers

Eclipse - For Perl, PHP and XML

Code::Blocks - For C/C++

dolphin/kdesvn - For usage with our software repositories.

My companies laptop runs Gentoo 64bit on an i7 system with 4GiB RAM. There I have a full scale KDE-4.6.0 (currently upgrading to 4.6.1) desktop with full semantic-desktop and kdepim. Main applications are:

Amarok - Yes, editing large XML-Files can be quite dull... Nothing against a good round of "Epica" or "Iron Maiden" in your ear then.

Eclipse and Code::Blocks for the same reasons as above, but more seldom, because:

Geany - Most stuff I have to edit on my laptop are quick fixes, where geany is more than enough for

At home I used to use gentoo on an AMD PhenomII system, but currently I do most of my own private stuff on my laptop, too. Therefore the home desktop runs Windows 7 Pro 64bit for gaming reasons mainly. (Which means.. uhm... about 2 to 3 hours a week.)

...ah! Nearly forgot:
On my companies laptop I have three Gentoo Virtual Machines as a VMware Team to test High Speed Clustering with Gentoo._________________systemd - The biggest fallacies

Been using Gentoo for about two years now (used Fedora - core 4 to F9 - before and have used Ubuntu which is cool but for no more than a few days) and when I started I got instantly hooked. The more I learned the more I liked it.
I take my laptop with me every day to college so yes I use it every day. Gentoo is a very flexible and versatile system. LOVE IT!

I have a Windows partition but it's been sooooooooo long since I last used it that the part of the hard disk in which the partition is located probably have rust by now.

Code:

emerge --lets-dominate-the-world NOW

--------Apart--------
I read in a few posts that you guys use gentoo for VIDEO EDITING and I'm interested in which software do you use, if you use a particular one.
You can PM me so not to change the subject of the thread.
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I also have gentoo on a 400MHz PowerPC computer built on 1999, I ocasionally update it (with distcc, cross-compiling on intel hardware), just for the fun of it._________________Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
Mark Twain

i dual boot something on my desktop here. Im not sure what the other thing is or if it even works otherwise its 100% gentoo desktop_________________A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

work:
large cluster of mail servers (more than a dozen, less than a hundred, the total is hush hush!)
smallish cluster of web servers (about a dozen)
The rest of our stuff is CentOS, but the systems we need to scale as well harden to all hell, they get the "Hardened Gentoo" treatment.

home:
desktop is gentoo + Host OS for 4 KVM guests (web, mail, irc, vpn - all gentoo)
two laptops, both dual-boot between gentoo and Windows 7. Only ever boot into Windows 7 when I need to do something in Office that's going to be viewed by the public, as OpenOffice doesn't quite format things in a way viewable by folks on Win*, OR, when I need to use Softerra (there simply aren't any LDAP browsers out there for Linux that do as well as Softerra).

I have used Gentoo for almost a year now, since switching from Ubuntu, my first distro. I use it on all of my computers.

my main PC: a 2009 own-built tower with an Intel Q9650, which I use as my desktop
my netbook: a Toshiba NB500 with an Atom N550, which I bought yesterday
my VPS: an OpenVZ-based server which I use to host pretty much everything, including dovecot, qmail, lighttpd, git, transmission-daemon, tor, squirrelmail and more

Because my netbook is too slow to reasonably compile large amounts of packages, I point it to use distcc on my main PC so things go a little quicker.

I tried gentoo on my netbook (switch from backtrak 3) a few months ago in order to get the best from its low hardware specs. I was so impressed by its upgraded performance (never built a kernel before, and got surprized at how fast it boots and responds), that I switched my tower PC from slack too. Both machines work for music listening, watching movies, tv, browsing and some C development for my university courses. I will try (after exams period) to be able to record audio (through a tascam usb soundcard) as I am also amateur guitar player, and hope I can get it working, as gentoo hasn't let me down yet
Also I use a kind of "monolithic" (meaning no-modular) kernel approach; the only thing built as module is bttv for my tv card, as I don't use it much often.

and on an OLPC via http://gentooxo.org , adapted to use only the shell most of the time with emacs for desktop-functionality which can easily be shared between OLPC and desktop by working in Mercurial repositories (given that emacs works with text files which are perfect for distributed version tracking). I build it in a chroot (folder) and sync on a USB stick via rsync._________________Being unpolitical means being political without realizing it. - Arne Babenhauserheide ( http://draketo.de )

1. We use Gentoo at work as the base OS for arcade games (old school coin operated games, the kind you cram quarters into for hours).
2. My development laptop (konsole + vim + cscope + ctags)
It's also a generic work machine (email, internet, office, etc)_________________

Quote:

And on the 3rd day, God created the Remington bolt-action rifle; so that man could fight the dinosaurs and the homosexuals. AMEN.